FSFE's work on Open Standards

We increasingly entrust our information and communication to
electronic storage and transmission. Open Standards are
essential for your records and communication to outlive the
application you are currently using. Lack of Open Standards
quickly leads to data lock-in, generally followed by product and
vendor lock-in. FSFE is promoting Open Standards in order to
ensure equal freedom of data, competition, and innovation for
everyone.

Open Standards and Democracy

Electronic records and communication include those of your
government, such as tax and legal records or minutes of
parliamentary proceedings. Making sure that such records remain in
the control of the government is essential for a functioning
democracy. The same is true for all interactions between citizens
and their government, which should never depend on monopolies or
the proprietary product of a single company.

Open Standards and Your Wallet

Open Standards are essential for a free market and competition
between various solutions because users can choose freely. Such
competition results in better functionality and prices for
everyone, you included.

Open Standards and Innovation

All innovation stands on the shoulders of giants. Open
Standards ensure that everyone can climb on those shoulders and
innovate. Lack of Open Standards can stifle innovation by
allowing the innovator of the last layer to claim everything
that came before and control everything that follows.

Open Standards in court

Our work on Open Standards is closely linked with various areas
of activity. This includes the Freedom Task Force and in
particular the antitrust case against Microsoft where FSFE and
Samba worked to free the workgroup server protocol layer.

Open Standards in government

Throughout Europe, FSFE is working hard to convince
governments to make Open Standards the default choice for the
public sector. Issues such as equal access to government services
for all citizens, fighting vendor lock-in, promoting competition,
and the long-term archiving of data are all closely tied to the
use of Open Standards.

Open Standards at ISO

International Standards of the ISO are not Open Standards in
general. An example of this are the MPEG standards or the
proprietary versions of PDF. When Microsoft pushed its MS-OOXML
for ISO approval, FSFE was among the first to highlight the
issues. Our intensive work on MS-OOXML helped to demonstrate the
problems in the ISO process.